The Rule

It’s simple really. It revolves around telling your teams what to do. That is providing your directives, strong opinions, and guidance when you’re interacting with your fledgling Agile teams.

The premise is that for every 100 opportunities that you are confronted with in your organization to provide prescriptive advice to your teams, you get no more than 5 times actually to tell your teams what to do.

You have to keep the tally in your head.

You have to be honest about it.

You shouldn’t tell anyone else you’re doing it. It’s just for you.

What does the rule do?

As leaders, it helps us by:

• Preventing us from micromanaging or being overly prescriptive.

Forcing us to carefully consider our engagement points with the team.

Hopefully, it encourages us to keep a few opportunities in reserve, in case there is an emergency intervention needed

In general, it causes us to pause and think before we go mucking around our teams – telling them what to do.

But it does give us the opportunity to, dare I say it, LEAD because it also encourages us to engage when it matters the most.

Circumventing the Rule?

I hate to say it, but you can circumvent the rule. How, might you ask?

You can circumvent it by asking, carefully crafted, open-ended questions of your team. Not trick questions or leading questions, but true curiosity questions or important questions that your teams may be missing.

These questions are intended to get your teams thinking about things from a different perspective. And they are fair game, in that they don’t count against your 5 allowed prescriptive comments.

Wrapping up

I told you it was simple.

And I know what you’re thinking. Is this something I made up OR do I actually use the rule myself?

I actually use it. And I’ve found it helps me to achieve the balance I need to be an effective Agile leader. My hope is you find the same with it.

Oh and, let’s leave it as a RULE for now. I think you’ve got to practice and earn the right to loosen it up a bit.

Robert 'Bob' Galen is the President and Principal Consultant of RGCG, L.L.C. a Cary, NC based agile methods coaching & training consultancy. He is a deeply experienced agile coach who is active in the agile community and regularly writes & teaches on all topics related to the agile methods. Bob wrote the book Scrum Product Ownership, which is focused on that role and driving value in team delivery. Bob can be reached at bob@rgalen.com and networked with via his LinkedIn profile.